April 17,
2012 "Information
Clearing House" ---
On Saturday March 31, I was delighted to be asked to speak at a
demonstration outside the US Embassy marking
the 9th anniversary of the disappearance of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui,
a Pakistani neuroscientist who vanished with her three children
in Karachi on March 30, 2003. It took nearly five and a half
years until she reappeared in Afghanistan, where she was
arrested by Afghan soldiers, and where, after apparently trying
and failing to shoot at the US soldiers to whose custody she had
been transferred, she was flown to the United States — rendered,
one might say — where she was tried in New York, and, in
September 2010,
sentenced to 86 years in prison.

I have
written about Aafia Siddiqui’s case
on many occasions, and have also spoken about her at
several demonstrations and
other meetings, but her story never becomes any easier in
the telling, as it is so full of holes, involves rumours of her
torture, the disappearance of two of her children for many
years, and the presumption that her third child, a baby boy, was
killed at the time of her disappearance. It also remains opaque
and troubling because of the strange circumstances of her
capture in 2008, her odd trial, and that hugely draconian
sentence. Her alleged role as an al-Qaeda operative remains
shadowy, and her current situation remains a source of alarm, as
she is held in Carswell, in Fort Worth, Texas, a Federal Medical
Center that provides specialized medical and mental health
services to female offenders, but that has a terrible reputation
for the abuse of the women held there.

The
demonstration, which was organised by the
Justice for Aafia Coalition, featured several other
speakers, whose
videos can be found here, and as many of them were speaking
eloquently and at length about Dr. Siddiqui’s case, I took the
opportunity to explain how she was one of many dozens of
“high-value detainees” subjected to extraordinary rendition and
torture in the Bush years, and to mention not only how there has
been no accountability for those who authorised the program, but
also how there has
never been an official account of who was held.

We do,
however, know that some of the many dozens of prisoners ended up
in Guantánamo in September 2006, after years in secret CIA
prisons, and I took the opportunity to talk about one of these
men, Abu Zubaydah, the first of the “high-value detainees,” for
whom the torture program was specifically developed. Zubaydah’s
capture took place almost exactly a year before Dr. Siddiqui’s
capture, and at the protest I drew on the various elements of
this story that I described in my recent article,
Ten Years of Torture: On Anniversary of Abu Zubaydah’s Capture,
Poland Charges Former Spy Chief Over “Black Site”.

Below is
another short video of Lt. Col. Lorraine Barlett, a member of
the US Army Judge Advocate General Corps, who is currently
serving as a defense counsel with the Office of Military
Commissions, representing a Saudi prisoner,
Ghassan al-Sharbi, who was charged under President Bush in
2008, but then had those charges dropped. He has not been
charged again under President Obama. I was meeting Lt. Col.
Barlett, and had suggested meeting at the rally, where I thought
she would meet some interesting people, and be well-received,
and I will be writing an article about her client in the near
future. In the meantime, you can
support his release via this Facebook page.